Finding forests with Kitsap's head woodsman

Arno Bergstrom grew up on a Midwestern farm surrounded by cornfields and open sky.

But he felt most at home in a clump of trees that persisted among the neat rows his father tended. The grove – an anomaly on the south Minnesota prairie – had probably been planted for firewood or to protect crops from high winds. To the young farm boy, it was a virtual wilderness filled with adventure and mystery.

"My dad always knew he could find me there," Bergstrom said.

Hired last year as Kitsap County's first public lands forester, Bergstrom is – five decades later – still hiding out in the woods, and he still gets wide-eyed when he finds magic in a grove.

"This is it! This is the cool stuff," he says in the thick of Newberry Hill Heritage Park, a 1,100-acre forest beyond the reach of Silverdale's parking lots and big box stores. "If the whole park looked like this, we wouldn't have to do anything in here."

Trees towering above Bergstrom are a widely spaced mix of firs, hemlock and cedar. Crowding around their trunks are masses of huckleberry, salal and other shrubs.

But large portions of the park are, in Bergstrom's eyes, little more than overgrown cornfields. As a former industrial timberland, Newberry had been densely planted for maximum profit decades ago. Now these Douglas fir "monocultures" are sickly shadows of natural forests, lacking much in the way of wildlife or plant diversity, Bergstrom said.

The forester's solution: logging. Bergstrom's proposal for thinning Newberry recently got the go-ahead from county leaders. By this summer, Newberry will be abuzz with loggers cutting and hauling out about a million board feet of timber.

Strategic replanting will then commence, making more of Newberry like the older, more varied stand of trees Bergstrom found so "cool."

The county plans to reinvest all money generated from timber sales back into its new forestry program.

Many park goers were skeptical – even hostile – to the idea of harvesting trees in county parks. Frank Stricklin, a member of the Friends of Newberry Hill Heritage Park, couldn't believe what Bergstrom was proposing.

"What? You mean you want to cut trees in a park? Ridiculous," Stricklin said, recalling his initial reaction.

But Bergstrom won Stricklin over with a strategy he's employed successfully with dozens of park advocates, environmentalists and local policy makers.

"He listens carefully," Sticklin said. "And then he gives you all this information, and it comes out in a jumble. You don't understand all of it, so you do your own research. You find that what he says is true, and then you respect him."

Farm to Forest

Bergstrom stepped aside when his father was ready to hand over the family farm. While his younger brother took over, Bergstrom went off to college to study forestry – an interest that had grown during family trips to national parks and national forests in Colorado, Wyoming and California.

He earned a masters degree in forest resources from the University of Minnesota and then headed west, where the big trees grew.

In 1978, he was hired as a forester by the Washington State University Extension, a program that educates small farmers and landowners on natural resource stewardship.

His first assignment was in Pierce County, helping rural residents manage their woodlands for both harvest and habitat. By 2000, Bergstrom had moved over to the extension's Kitsap office, first working as its agriculture and natural resources specialist and then as director before he retired in May.

Bergstrom's work with the WSU Extension – which totaled 35 years – taught him the value of easing people over to his way of thinking.

"I couldn't tell people what to do with their land. I could only make suggestions," he said. "But the work prepared me for what I'm doing now because I worked with a lot of different people."

The traditional job of a forester is to maximize timber production, and that often meant clear cutting and dense replanting.

"But that's not what the people I worked with wanted," he said. "If you own 40 acres, you don't want to clear-cut 10 acres. It's yours and you live in it, so you want it beautiful. You want wildlife, you want healthy trees and you want to leave a legacy for your children."

Forest Parks

That's the approach the county parks department is taking with Newberry and its other forested parks.

The department has been shifting its focus away from small, "active parks" that feature sports fields and playgrounds. Now the emphasis is on large parks that have value to both wildlife and people.

"A lot of people want to get out in nature. They want to create 'greenbelts' in urban areas," Parks Director Jim Dunwiddie said. "More of the demand is for mountain biking and hiking activities rather than the 'active recreation' we used to focus on."

Over the last decade, most of the growth in the county parks system has been in large 'heritage parks' like Newberry. The five heritage parks account for more than half of the county's 6,245 acres of parkland.

By Bergstrom's estimate, about a third of the acreage devoted to forested parks is "overstocked" with 30-year-old tree plantations.

Bergstrom will likely have his hands full in the years to come.

In February, the county acquired 535 acres of former timberland along Port Gamble Bay. Over the next year, the county is poised to nearly double the 443-acre North Kitsap Heritage Park.

Work is underway to preserve nearly 6,000 more acres of former timberland in North Kitsap.

Stricklin admits that these properties would likely return to a natural state on their own.

"Letting them sort themselves out could take 300 years," he said. "But what (Bergstrom) recognizes is that people are a big part of the environment. We caused some of the problems, and we can help get them back to where they should be."